Over several sessions between Jan. and Aug. of 2025, the Texas State Legislature passed 1,225 bills: more than two dozen focus on public education. Among these, notable ones concern school vouchers, public school funding, the display of the Ten Commandments in schools, and banning of personal communication devices in schools. The passing of these laws have impacted public school students around the state.
LASA senior Luca Sims leads the Student Advocacy Alliance, an organization that promotes student involvement in politics. They attended Texas congressional meetings discussing bills where members of the public could share their thoughts during the most recent legislative sessions.
“The big fight this year was over vouchers,” Sims said. “There was a big debate over that and how effective it would be, and we’re gonna see that impact pretty soon. I think it will be interesting to see because it may have a really significant impact on the state budget and obviously on Texas kids.”
School vouchers, implemented by Senate Bill 2 during the regular session, are a system where students going to private schools receive about $10,000 each school year from the state government to pay for their attendance. Families will be allowed to claim this payout in the 2026–27 school year.
“Being a Texas public school student, I think that we shouldn’t be putting money into private schools,” Sims said. “We should be putting it into public schools because our public schools really need funding, and the impact of the vouchers was not widespread enough to justify the argument that was being made that was like, ‘Oh, it will let kids escape from failing public schools.’ I think we just shouldn’t have failing public schools.”
AP U.S. Government and Politics as well as AP U.S. History teacher John Goodell provided his legal opinions on some of the recent bills as a former lawyer, including how school vouchers change recapture. Through recapture, some urban tax money pays for rural schools and other state expenses, and it now pays for school vouchers as well.
“Dallas, Houston, Austin, San Antonio, Fort Worth, they’re funding rural areas,” Goodell said. “That is done for some equity reasons, but if you’re going to add in vouchers to the mix, I wonder if you haven’t created a constitutional question that might take it out of, if it were challenged correctly, the state of Texas’ hands.”
While school vouchers raise concerns about public school funding among students like Sims, another bill increased public school funding. House Bill 2 will provide $8.5 billion to finance public school districts, which Grace Ford, another leader of the Student Advocacy Alliance, thought was significant.
“We all know how underfunded our schools are, how that impacts our teachers, our learning environments, and everything,” Ford said. “Hopefully this extra money can be helpful.”
The bill specified how much of the money must be spent to address these issues. About half of it is required to raise educators’ pay based on their work experience, and another portion is set aside for an overhaul on special education funding.
“Funding for Texas public schools hasn’t been increased since 2019, up until now, and, of course, we’ve had massive inflation in that time,” Sims said. “I don’t even think that the funding that was put towards it gets us back to 2019 funding levels.”
Senate Bill 10 was passed in the regular session and requires classrooms to display a specific translation of the Ten Commandments if it is donated and complies with certain standards. The bill is currently on hold in several districts pending a lawsuit. The suit was initiated by multiple different groups, including the American Civil Liberties Union and Americans United for Separation of Church and State, as they see the bill as an infringement on the First Amendment’s right to freedom of religion.
“The Ten Commandments in classrooms is a big one because it throws into question previously determined Supreme Court law, or case law, that has said that you shouldn’t have prayer or anything like that in a school room,” Goodell said.
The 2025 lawsuit challenging SB 10, Rabbi Nathan v. Alamo Heights Independent School District, posited that the bill is a violation of the First Amendment on the grounds that it is a constitutional violation of non-religious government and the free practice of religion. Negotiations are ongoing about the meaning of legislation like SB 10 and SB 2, leading Goodell to think defiance is the best policy to save money.
“The most aggressive, very controversial, but potentially effective thing to do would be to refuse to pay recapture, and then if the state took over Austin ISD, you could then claim that that was retaliation,” Goodell said. “If you were worried about the school taking you over, ‘Hey! If we had more resources, we wouldn’t have that problem, and now since we’ve kept those resources, you’re punishing us by taking us over.’ And I think a court would really not like that. I think that would be a very uncomfortable argument to have to deal with.”